


Better

by Flightless_Bird



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Angst, Artificial Intelligence, Avengers: Endgame (Movie) Spoilers, Father-Son Relationship, Grief, Moving On, Peter Needs a Hug, Post-Endgame, References to Infinity War, Slight Hurt/Comfort, Titan, but he’s getting there
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-28
Updated: 2019-04-28
Packaged: 2020-02-09 05:47:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,860
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18632053
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Flightless_Bird/pseuds/Flightless_Bird
Summary: “I—I want the message, please,” Peter whispered.Without a word, the hologram vanished. Then static crackled as the voicemail sent to his phone began to play.“Hey, kid. Guess who.”





	Better

**Author's Note:**

> I like pain. :3   
> But in all seriousness, this movie messed me up so bad. I wanted to write something acknowledging Peter’s grief, give him a piece of Tony, and show his progress.   
> I hope you like, and thank you for reading :)

As always, it could be better.

There was too much delay in the shot, when Peter activated the web-slingers, and they weren’t firing as far as he’d like. To get more power, he’d probably have to inlay them deeper into the arm of the suit, which wasn’t difficult, but was work.

Luckily, work was all he was burying himself in these days.

So, after school, he was found in his room, hunched over the desk with the arm of a suit in front of him. Light music hummed in the background, interrupted only by the hiss and clatter of his tools. A plate of peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich sat on the bed, untouched. He didn’t look up as he worked, fingers nimbly aligning the ejecting site of the web-slinger and hooking it into place. The thought of calling Ned to have him take a look flickered once. Instead, Peter reached over to his mask and tapped the side of the eyepiece. “Hey, Mr. Stark, gimme a hand?”

His near-constant earpiece buzzed to life and instead of the artificial voice of Karen, a much different A.I. greeted him. This one was one that he’d spent weeks designing himself. “ _Yeah, kid, what d’you need?”_

For a moment, something both blooming and painful lit up the inside of Peter’s chest. He’d done a pretty good job of getting the tone right. He smiled. “I need to know if I should add some more spring back here,” he said, tapping the suit’s arm. “To get more power behind the shot.”

“ _Give me a sec.”_ There was a pause, in which Peter examined his suit and tried not to be too hopeful. “ _Got it.”_ His phone screen lit up and he unlocked it to see the scrolling information the A.I. had sent him. “ _You're gonna want to focus more on the ejection point, making it smoother. That’s what’s slowing you down, and if you add too much more to that spring mechanism in the back, you’re gonna blow the thing.”_

It wasn’t quite like him. But then again, it never could be.

Peter nodded. “Thanks.” Making the adjustments, he held up the newly-completed arm and studied it. There should be a test run, he decided, to see how it would function and if he’d place everything in right. It would be much easier if he had someone else to point out where he’d need tweaks, rather than trying to find them himself. The notion sparked an idea in his mind, of another technological invention he’d been meaning to test as well. He glanced at his bedroom door. Aunt May wouldn't be coming up, she probably assumed he was working on homework or something before dinner. It wasn’t that he didn’t want her to see—he just didn’t want her to see before it worked properly, or before she’d thought he’d moved on enough to even use something like this.

He didn’t want to be judged.

Jaw tightening in determination, he slipped his hand into the arm of the suit and flexed his fingers. At the same time, he reached over and tapped his eyepiece twice. It lit up, beaming a hologram behind his back.“All right, how’s it look?” he asked with a grin, standing up and turning to face it.

The smile was wiped right off of his face.

Glowing soft blue in the hologram’s pixels, was Tony Stark, standing across from him in his room. He glitched a bit at the edges, and there was a disjointed motion in his arms when he crossed them, but other than that… Peter had done it. He’d designed an A.I. and given it a hologram and it was Tony Stark.

“ _It’d look fine, if you weren’t wearing it like that, kid_ ,” Tony pointed out, and Peter jumped at the sound of his voice. Tony was pointing at his arm and as he did, a beam of light from the holo image highlighted the place where the web-slinger should be at his wrist.

“O—oh,” Peter stammered, movements sluggish all of a sudden. “Yeah, of course.” He tugged the arm into the correct position and held it up, placing his middle and ring finger over the trigger mechanism. “How’s that?”

“ _Better_.” Holo-Tony stepped closer, and Peter suddenly felt like the room shrank around him. “ _You gotta make sure that trigger is faster now too_ ,” Tony pointed out, a blue line appearing on Peter’s arm to trace the inner workings. “ _You got more distance between it and the ejector site now. If it’s not firing hard, you’re gonna lose any work you made on that delay.”_

“Oh, yeah, yeah, good point. I didn’t think of that.”

“ _Yeah, that’s why you got me, remember_?”

Peter’s head jerked up, and he met Tony’s gaze. He knew the joking was programmed, everything was programmed to be human, even the lopsided smile. He’d learned from studying the best, of course, looking at Karen’s design, even old files of JARVIS that had been left for him. But it was still jolting to see.

He beamed back at Tony. “Thanks, Mr. Stark,” he murmured, and all of the sudden, his vision was blurring over.

Fighting to keep the happiness in his face, as though Tony would care, he scrubbed his sleeve over his eyes. Breaths shuddering, he tried to clear his throat. “That, uh, that’s really—nice of you.” _Oh my god, it’s literally a hologram, stop it Peter_. He couldn’t. “I guess I should, um. Work on it a little more, and uh, you can—you can help out?”

“ _Always_ ,” Tony replied, voice light with pixelated humor.

Peter made a noise that was intended to be a laugh and came out tangled with a sob. Backing up, he fell into his chair and covered his face with his hands. He was so stupid, what made him think this was a good idea, hearing him was one thing, remembering him one thing, but _seeing_ him—

Peter bit down on his lip to stop another sob from coming out—Aunt May couldn't hear—and he began to taste blood.

“ _Pete, your heart rate’s picking up,”_ Tony informed him. “ _You okay?”_

“‘M okay,” Peter lied, barely a whisper. “I—I’m okay. I’ll be okay, dad.” He froze.

The thing about Peter Parker was that even in moments of emotion, he could think of any outcome. When he’d worked feverishly on the A.I. system, perfecting the hologram design and the cameras…he’d thought of what might happen if he couldn’t handle it. So he’d planned for this, coded in a keyword for Tony to recognize and to pull him back to the present, to reality.

The keyword was _dad_.

Tony was gazing at him with a softened, less-human expression across his features. “ _You want the message or for me to follow the protocol?_ ” he asked, patient.

As always, there was a choice. But there was no option to override both. Peter had done that to himself, forced himself to pick either to hear the message or enlist Stark Internship Protocol, which would automatically shut down the A.I. until his heart rate and roiling mind returned to normal. He couldn’t hide from it. To ignore it, to force the A.I. to respond to “dad” and act like everything was normal, could be dangerous.

“I—I want the message, please,” Peter whispered.

Without a word, the hologram vanished. Then static crackled as the voicemail sent to his phone began to play.

“Hey, kid. Guess who.”

Peter closed his eyes.

“If I programmed your suit right, this is only gonna be accessible to you when I’m dead. …shit, that was dark, huh? Sorry about that. Anyway, I’m in the middle of space, right, with the gang of misfits and Doctor Wizard, on our way to Titan. Gotta say, it’s hard to get alone time with a bunch of idiot aliens onboard, not to mention you. You know you follow me everywhere, right?

But, uh. Listen, Pete. I’m not stupid. I know that this might be a one-way trip for me. Not for you. Because I’m not letting anything happen to you, you hear me? You die, you’re grounded.”

Peter managed a wobbly smile.

“I mean it, I’ll call Aunt May and you _know_ she’ll bring your ass back from the dead to lock you in your room for a year.” A half-hearted chuckle, then silence for a moment. “I listened to your messages, from before. All eighty-six of them. First of all, Jesus Christ. Second of all: if I’m gone, if I don’t make it back, and you do—don’t stop. Don’t stop helping the people no one thinks about. Keep helping old ladies cross the street, and getting cats out of trees, and stopping gas-station-robbing thugs. There isn’t enough of you in the world, and I don’t think there’ll ever be. So don’t stop.

And Peter? I’m, uh. I’m proud of you. And I think—” There was a break and a rough sigh. Then Peter cranked up the volume, because Tony had whispered this part under his breath and hadn’t known the audio picked it up. “Shit, sometimes I think you’re my son. Gotta stop that.”

In the seconds after, Peter felt the hot tears sliding down his face, but he was smiling wider.

“Okay, I gotta go. We’re gonna try to land this piece of crap. If you get this, just— remember that no matter what happened, no matter how I ended, I was lucky that I got to spend even some of this working with you and watching you grow. I don’t know how I got that lucky, but. You know.

See ya around, Parker.”

The message clicked to an end, and Peter cried in earnest now. He fumbled on his desk for the nearest piece of fabric—a black hoodie—and buried his face in it, shoulders shaking. It hurt, it did. It always did. But in the hurt, there was that warmth again, that little glowing thing that swelled up in his chest every time he heard Tony’s voice in that message. Piece by piece, it was putting him back together.

After the sobs had died away and he had thoroughly ruined his hoodie, he lifted his head. The room was still quiet. His computer screen threw gentle light over his back. The uneaten PB and J still waited on the bed. Sniffling, he wiped his eyes and pushed his hair back.

“ _All good now, kid?_ ” the A.I. asked from his earpiece. The hologram wouldn’t make itself shown again until he asked it to.

Nodding, Peter slipped off the suit’s arm-piece and stood up. “Yeah,” he exhaled, long and slow. “Yeah, I’m okay. Gonna get a glass of water, I think.”

“ _Good. I’ll talk to you later.”_

“Okay. Thank you.”

The earpiece quieted and Peter shut it off for now. Flopping down on the bed, he snagged his phone and a water bottle, and pulled up his _Watch Later_ playlist on YouTube. He even took a bite out of the PB and J.

They were steps. Small ones, but it didn’t matter.

Tony would have been proud of him anyway.


End file.
